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The Blender team have secured even more funding, this time from NVIDIA

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Following on from Ubisoft and Epic Games becoming Blender sponsors, NVIDIA have also thrown a bucketful of money into the ring.

Announcing it on Twitter, the Blender team said:

NVIDIA joined the Blender Foundation Development Fund at Patron level. This will enable two more developers to work on core Blender development and to keep NVIDIA's GPU technology well supported for our users. Thanks NVIDIA for the trust in our work!

As a little followup the Chairman of the Blender Foundation, Ton Roosendaal, mentioned on Twitter how they've worked with NVIDIA for many years already and that they're "very happy to see this being consolidated in Development Fund membership".

This is pretty incredible for the free and open source 3D creation suite used by tons of individuals and massive companies. From huge movies to video games and more, Blender is very popular and it's cross-platform across Linux, MacOS and Windows as well. Seeing more companies throw their weight behind open source like this is excellent.

With NVIDIA being at a "Patron" level, this means they're pledging at least €120k per year which means they're the joint highest next to Epic Games for supporting Blender through their Corporate Memberships system. According to their funding page, they now get around €82,471 per month. Somewhat amusing that their original goal was only 25K per month, with a 50K per month "stretch goal" they thought was quite ambitious and now they've cruised ahead of it. You can see Blender's funding information on this page.

If you want to try it out you can download it from the official site or Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Apps, Misc, NVIDIA, Open Source | Apps: Blender
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16 comments

Shmerl Oct 7, 2019
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Nice backing for Blender! May be Godot will also gain stronger momentum like that.
damarrin Oct 8, 2019
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Blender needed more than 20 years to get where it's now, Godot still has a ways to go. ;-)

Still, open source has been doing the rounds recently, so who knows. I certainly wish them the best of luck.


Last edited by damarrin on 8 October 2019 at 5:12 am UTC
ElectricPrism Oct 8, 2019
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As much as I dislike Nvidia for things they've done in the past and have drifted away from using, or recommending them.

And as much as the business man in me see's the blatant exchange of resources and mutual interests usually described as "a job", "partnership", or "contract"...

Hell, mutual dependence and investment of funds into a FOSS project I am totally cool with. Thumbs up.
chr Oct 8, 2019
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Yeah, the money for a good cause is appreciated. But I think these kinds of things are almost always a calculated move to somewhat legitimize their market dominance and wealth. So I still like competitive markets more.
Termy Oct 8, 2019
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On the one hand, it is good that blender gets funding - on the other hand i'd hate to see funding on a FOSS-Project "wasted" by supporting closed stuff like CUDA :/
Philadelphus Oct 8, 2019
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I wanted to get into fish model modding in Megaquarium recently, only to discover that Blender was specifically mentioned as not working due to the file format chosen. Here's hoping that more sponsorships like this in the future will lead to more support and more use of FOSS-compatible standards! :D
damarrin Oct 8, 2019
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As long as it means CUDA is _also_ supported, it’s all good. Should it suddenly become the _only_ thing that works, that’ll be huge grounds for concern.
titi Oct 8, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:


Last edited by titi on 8 October 2019 at 9:02 am UTC
Liam Dawe Oct 8, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:
I would be surprised, given how Blender is used on Linux in big productions. Was big news years ago. Disney, Pixar and so on all use it.
Power-Metal-Games Oct 8, 2019
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Well it's not incredible at all that Blender become so big. When you use it everyday you cannot but notice how polished it is compared to any software you've ever used. They are listening to their users, accepting proposals, the code, they are improving things every single day for years. Meanwhile, development of Maya and Max is so slow and they are losing users. But it wasn't like that before 2.80. They done absolutely fantastic work with it. If you didn't check it already, just search for NextGen animated movie. It was developed completely with Blender for Netflix by some guys. One Japanese 2D animation studio switched to Blender too. That screenshot is from Spring, short movie by Blender Animation Studios. You should check it also, if you already didn't.
It's much better for studios to invest money and development time into Blender than to do everything by themselves.

And Blender is my all time favorite software together with UE4. I just enjoy every moment using both of them.


Last edited by Power-Metal-Games on 8 October 2019 at 10:38 am UTC
Power-Metal-Games Oct 8, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:

No. Just check this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0
riidom Oct 8, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:
Funny story, the situation is kinda inverted atm: Most devs apparently use Linux, bugs on Windows get noticed pretty late sometimes.
And, what the guy above me said. \m/


Last edited by riidom on 8 October 2019 at 7:19 pm UTC
Purple Library Guy Oct 8, 2019
As long as it means CUDA is _also_ supported, it’s all good. Should it suddenly become the _only_ thing that works, that’ll be huge grounds for concern.
a fork.
The beauty of open source.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 8 October 2019 at 10:03 pm UTC
titi Oct 8, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:

No. Just check this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0

ok convinced :), This makes me happy!
smantz0rZ Oct 9, 2019
Blender confuses me. It's open source but still somehow the most difficult modeling software ever created, which is unusual for open source. They're making significant strides to increase the usability of their software, and with Epic and NVidia's help this will be achieved!
Cyril Oct 9, 2019
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And I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:

No. Just check this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0

I don't use Blender, but some tests in this video are quite impressive, and I like a lot the conclusion of course because it can bring (with many other reasons) more people to Linux/Free software in the long term.
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